My Mother inspired me to run… now I am a mother inspiring others to run!

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Wow… that was the fastest five miles I have ever ran! Thanks to my running buddy, our fastest mile was 8:23. I never thought of myself as fast, but that is freakin’ fast! Now, there is no way I could keep up that pace for longer than 5 miles. I was done at the end.

It’s funny because I almost didn’t go to training tonight. As I got in the car and drove away from my house it started pouring. Not just raining, but that wonderful Florida downpour we experience so often. However, I kept driving and kept hoping that it would subside. Fortunately, it turned to a mere sprinkle and then to no precipitation at all. It is kind of weird around here. You can have totally different weather on one side of Jacksonville compared to the other side. As I arrived, it was clear skies all along our running route. So, you never know… don’t despair and don’t give up to soon.

So, I obviously wasn’t in the mood to run in a downpour, but I also just wasn’t really in the mood to run period. Last week kind of took a toll on my poor body and I just wanted to take it easy and relax. I didn’t even run at the gym yesterday. I joined the world of the elliptical machines… that felt different, but kind of nice on the knees. Since I was in “relaxation mode” I wanted to keep it that way for this evening’s run.

Then we start running… and we ran faster and then faster. I think to myself “well, we can’t keep this up for too long,” but then the competitive streak in me steps in. Well, I don’t want to be the one to back off. It was obvious that my running buddy didn’t want to back off… so we played yet another game of pushing it to keep up with each other. Once again she announced “oh, you can keep going when we get to the bridge because I think I will have to slow down.” Well, do you think she slowed down? No! Did I slow down? No! We only went as fast as our little legs could go up that darn annoying hill. It was zoom zoom down the bridge and then like we were finishing a race for the last mile. Whoa! And can you believe that we would have been even faster if we didn’t have 3 hills to climb? Awesome. Just don’t ask me to do it again 🙂